Some of the services provided by the EnServe depend on the EnServe having some information about the person using the services. For example, to access shared folders a person must somehow identify themselves to the EnServe so it knows which folders they have access to. Other than the control of Internet access for specific computers most EnServe services are person related.

Before a person can use these person-related services you need to give the EnServe some information about the people.

Each person must be given a unique username and password which identifies them to the EnServe, along with details of which services they should have access to and some details about how e-mail should be handled for that person. This is covered in the Managing People section of this manual.

This username and password will be used by the person to access all EnServe services. It is usually desirable to use the same username and password that a person uses to log into their own computer on your network.

People and E-Mail Services

When you add a new person's details to the EnServe you can choose whether or not the EnServe provides a mailbox to allow them to receive e-mail. If a mailbox is provided then all e-mail collected by the EnServe for this person is (usually) stored in this mailbox. The person reads their mail by retrieving it from their mailbox using an e-mail client such as Microsoft Outlook. It is also possible to forward a person's e-mail to another e-mail address.

If a mailbox was provided for a person that person can be sent e-mail by other people on your network at the addresses username@localdomain (where username is the persons username and localdomain is the domain name of your office network). Mail addressed to username with no domain part will also be delivered to that person's mailbox. These internal addresses only work within your office network. For a person to be able to receive e-mail from the Internet further configuration is required, this is covered in the Incoming E-Mail and Managing Incoming E-Mail sections of this manual. Your external e-mail addresses may look something like username@mycompany.co.uk or username@mycompany.myisp.co.uk

A person can also be assigned alternates to the username part of their e-mail address. For example Joe Bloggs may have the username jbloggs so his main internal e-mail address would be jbloggs@localdomain. By assigning him the mail alias joe.bloggs he could also be sent mail using the addresses joe.bloggs@localdomain. Mail Aliases are discussed in more depth in the Incoming E-Mail section of this manual.

People and Shared Folders

If the shared folders option was selected when a person's details were added to the EnServe it creates folders that are accessible to that person from any computer on your office network. This also means that the person can store all their documents in their shared folder on the EnServe - where they can be automatically be scanned for viruses and/or backed-up to another computer.

The person can access their shared folder using any SMB file-sharing client, the most well known being the 'Network Neighbourhood' or 'My Network Places' Windows tools. The person will be required to supply their EnServe username and password to access their shared folder on the EnServe. This happens automatically if the person uses the same username and password to log into Windows as they do for EnServe services.

Within a person's shared folder is a folder called public_html ( \\WORKGROUP\username\public_html\ ). Any files stored in this folder will be available to other people on your network at http://intranet.localdomain\~username\. Inside that folder is a folder called private_html ( \\WORKGROUP\username\public_html\private_html\ ). Any files stored in this folder will also be available from the office Intranet at http://intranet.localdomain\~username\private_html\' but the person's username and password must be entered to gain (read-only) access to those files from any computer on your network without having to log in to that computer.

The enbox-admin Person

There is one special person with the username admin. As well as allowing access to the usual EnServe services the admin username and password allows access to the Administration Menu which provides the configuration menu for the EnServe. This gives the admin person complete control over the EnServe and access to all users files so it is wise for the person administrating the EnServe to guard their password well.